Can The Disposable Culture Get Maturity?

I hesitate to address you as Madame M, as it might carry an odd connotation given our subject matter! :)

Porn is part of our cultural norm about disposability. People aren’t people, they’re commodities, to be used up and thrown away. It is only more raw, and often more violent, than what corporations do to workers, or what TV’s transitory foci do to persons, or what the creating and destroying of superficial friendships and relationships do to psyches, etc.

As to using up these women, it is tragic and despicable as you say, but I am also reminded of what you have said previously about what this culture teaches or doesn’t teach women about true respect, true femininity, and the unfortunate results of that. Often the resulting superficiality and uncontrolled manipulation and commodifying of everything can set too many women up for exploitation and backlash. As one fellow (married, too) told me: “Think about it. If they’re good looking, they are all little hookers. They directly or indirectly trade sex, use sex, or manipulate via sex, to get what they want, whether it be material things, attention, commitment, control, or even just to see drama in others.” Harsh! What do you think?

This dovetails a bit with what you pointed out about the “getting even” aspect. I actually think it’s about more than merely lashing back about the women who wouldn’t have them when they were growing up (HAVE they grown up?). I think it’s also about a backlash concerning female social domination in general. These men might feel (in varying degrees of accuracy/inaccuracy) that females are in large part responsible for their feelings of inadequacy, reduction in masculinity, loss of control, isolation, etc.

“A million little fissures.” Madame, your turning of phrases has been spot-on-ingly grand! We are, as you suspect, building an accelerating, interlocking, cascading effect to our problems. An effect that multiplies and infects multiple parts of the societal and civilizational bodies, especially when those bodies’ immune systems are not activating and responding. Like human bodies, those cultural bodies will, in the absence of dramatic focus and dramatic action centered on holistic health, eventually be overwhelmed and succumb.

Something else that should make us anxious is that we almost never know the precise tipping point until after it has passed. And once again, we play games of chance with things from which we can’t really recover if we are wrong. Homo Sapiens Sapiens? More like Homo Puerilis Puerilis! (Stulti, if you’re a Julius Caesar fan!).

To return to Vegas, we keep being allured, like Percy Jackson in The Lightning Thief or people in the Matrix, by things which APPEAR to allow us to escape reality. In Vegas, we have Americans escaping reality, isolating themselves more in arrogant manufactures of caricatures of other cultures: “In a nation where less than 10 percent of the population has a passport, how many Americans can tell the difference between the illusion of France and the reality of France? How many can differentiate between Egypt and the illusion of Egypt? How many care?” Hedges (64-65). Hedges goes on to quote Postman about this entertainment of illusion: “For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, our religion, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protests or even much popular notice.” (65)

Hedges, especially on page 72, goes into too much unnecessary detail in my opinion. Perhaps he felt the need to shock his readers into considering and accepting his points, or perhaps he has unresolved issues about porn in general, I don’t know. Some of his conclusions seem a little too tied to the straight-jacket of Freud, and maybe even Nietzsche, both of whom had rather unexpansive views when it came to sex. Or perhaps his excessive fixation on, and relaying of, graphic sexuality is just my perception, and that maybe someone with little or no familiarity with porn would need to have that information presented to them.

But Hedges is making difficult connections, in my view, in making statements linking porn to a “society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza.” (73) I’m not sure how I feel about the statement, let alone the connection. He goes on to say that “porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street, warehouses more than 2 million in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradations of porn are expressions of a society that has lost its capacity for empathy.” (73) While I do not disagree with that particularly statement (although the piece about guns is a bit problematic to me), and nor do I disagree that we have lost a great deal of capacity for empathy, Hedges has lumped all forms of sexual titillation, etc. in with violent porn, which I don’t think is accurate.

Hedges says that the events of Abu Ghraib “reflect the raging undercurrent of sexual callousness and perversion that runs through contemporary culture. These images speak in the language of porn, professional wrestling, reality television, music videos, and the corporate culture. It is the language of absolute control, total domination, racial hatred, fetishistic images of slavery, and humiliating submission. It is a world without pity. It is about reducing other human beings to commodities, to objects. It is a reflection of the sickness of gonzo porn. Torture and porn inevitably converge. They each turn human beings into submissive objects. In porn the woman is stripped of human attributes and made to beg for abuse. She has no identity as distinct human being. Her only worth is as toy, a pleasure doll. She exists to gratify any whim that male decides is pleasurable. She has no other purpose. Her real name vanishes. She adopts a cheap and usually vulgar stage name. She becomes a slave. She is filmed being degraded and physically abused. This film is sold to consumers, who, in turn, are aroused by the illusion that they too can dominate and abuse women. They, too, can be torturers…Absolute power over others almost always expresses itself through sexual sadism.” (73-74) I cannot disagree with hardly a thing of what Hedges says here, and I would readily agree that sadism, like rape, is about the violence, not the sex. Hedges does however need to do a better job of discriminating for the reader between sex and violent porn. The former has had far too much puritan moralizing about it. Therefore, we don’t need any more contributions from that 17th century legacy hangover to the dualistic dysfunction our society has about sex.

I agree with Timothy Lukeman that distinctions need to be made. Hedges is not talking about erotica or old-fashioned porn, which at least portrayed sex as mutually enjoyable for men and women and as a natural impulse (at least from men). This humiliation, degradation, pain and suffering, etc., almost all of it inflicted on women for the pleasure of emotionally stunted men, is part of the violent road that too much of porn has taken. Yet Hedges does a poor job of acknowledging that non-violent porn still exists, although it is much reduced from its former state.

Hedges ignores, is unaware, or simply doesn't care about the views of many contemporary feminists (Annie Sprinkle and Naomi Wolff are two prominent ones) that porn can be many things, and is, in fact, NOT inherently degrading to women (and is sometimes not flattering to men). In fact, there are more than a few female erotica producers and directors. I say erotica, because they do tend to make different enough films from the usual male producers/directors that one needs to make that distinction, and there are even some male producers/directors of erotica.

One of the measures of maturity for this nation will be when it finally attains a healthy attitude about sexuality, one without exploitation, ignorance, or fear, and without it being used as a weapon (at least politically—not sure whether we will ever completely remove its weapon-like possibilities from personal relationships!).